Coachella 2018: How the Do Lab, ravaged by ‘big and bad’ windstorm, was rebuilt

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Mason Moser, 19, and Tailse Zirilli, 18, both of Seattle, share a moment inside the Do Lab Stage during Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. on Friday, April 20, 2018. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The night before, their structure, also known as Beacon — part art installation, part music stage where people go to dance and get sprayed by water cannons — was pummeled by sustained winds of 40 mph and consistent gusts of 50 mph.

“It was pretty disheartening,” said Flemming, chief financial officer and the logistical arm of the Los Angeles-based Do Lab.

It wasn’t just the structure that was thrashed. The backstage and staging area looked like a hurricane had come through: Poles were broken, lights were smashed and things were upside-down.

The group had less than three days to repair the damage before Weekend 2 of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival began. So they broke up into teams got to work.

Flemming, along with his brothers Josh and Jesse, are the founders of Do Lab, a company specializing in interactive environments, event production and creative lighting design. The Do Lab has been a mainstay of Coachella since 2004. Its one-of-a-kind structures and misters often provide a respite from the sun for attendees.

Even though this year’s Beacon is the same design as last year’s, it took more than 100 builders, designers and crew members to assemble the 40,000-square-foot structure.

“We had a windstorm the Tuesday before the first weekend and seven large fabric panels got beat up by the wind and had to be replaced,” Flemming said.

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Crews immediately went into repair mode and got through Weekend 1 without an issue.

The winds, however, came back.

“This was just, from what I understand, the largest windstorm in Coachella (festival) history. It wasn’t forecast to be as big and bad as it was,” he said.

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The winds started picking up Monday as the crew was preparing to go off site for a few days. One of the production crew members decided to check in on the structure, Flemming said.

The phone call from the crew member was pretty clear: They had a problem.

“The whole site just took a beating and it just kept getting worse through out the day,” Flemming said.

There’s an anemometer on the structure so Flemming and crew can see the wind speeds in real time on their phones. Winds got so severe that crew members were evacuated and they all had to watch remotely from a security webcam.

“It was tough to watch something you put so much energy into get ravaged by the wind,” he said. “At that point we didn’t know what the plan was going to be.”

On Tuesday morning, the remaining Do Lab team still out in the desert came to assess the damage.

Once they removed all the torn fabric, they put it on the ground like pieces of a puzzle to see what they had and what was missing, Flemming said.

The plan at the point was to call in the fabric team from Los Angeles; six industrial machines were also brought to the campgrounds.

Coachella organizers allowed the Do Lab to use the Yuma tent – which is air conditioned – for two straight days. All the blue fabric was repairable but the orange fabric had to be completely remade, he said.

“There was some doubt and we were sitting in a house down the street brainstorming Plan B, C, D, E, F,” he said. “We were kicking around every idea possible.”

With temperatures expected to reach 100 degrees this weekend, Flemming said he didn’t want to just open the structure up without any fabric.

They even contemplated going to a thrift store and buying up all the sneakers to create a shade structure.

It’s not that Flemming didn’t have confidence in his crew — he wasn’t sure they would have the time to get it done because there was more wind in the forecast.

Which meant the window to replace all the fabric shade shrunk as they were forced to wait until 10 p.m. Thursday.

“The amazing thing about our team was that everyone started reaching out: ‘How do I help? Do you need me to come out?’” he said. “We’re the Do Lab, we’re surrounded not just by creative people, but real ambitious and go-getters who want to make sure we achieved our goal.”

Less than 12 hours before gates opened Friday for Weekend 2, 10 boom lifts and ladders with at least 30 crew members were still feverishly installing all the new fabric.

“It was a proud moment seeing everyone rallying together to see the structure completed,” Flemming said. “This is the amazing people around us who made this happen, without them this would not have come back to life.”

Liset Márquez covers the cities of Pomona, Claremont, La Verne and San Dimas for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. A beat reporter for the Bulletin since 2006, she previously wrote for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. She keeps a watchful eye on city councils and the Dodgers.

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